Tough measures for tough times: thoughts from the Washington DC eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit
“We’ve got to do more with less.” Jim Sterne’s eMetrics opener reflected the reality of the roller-coaster turmoil of the current economic environment. The environment in which, amongst others things, next year’s marketing budgets are currently being planned.
Regardless of where an organisation sits on the budget spectrum, it is absolutely clear that every marketing Dollar, Pound, Euro is going to need to work significantly harder. As marketers, analysts and business owners we are going to need to figure out how to use the tools and data we have more intelligently.
After all, we are the ones driving business value. We have the information that allows the organisation to achieve more by spending less money. (So make those other guys redundant first please).
To quote liberally from some of the great speakers from the last four days:
- “Analytics is about using web data to run your business … using online data to change how you do business offline.” Jim Sterne
- “Marketing is a game of what little can we do to get the most response… Less is more” Kim Johnston, Symantec Corporation
- “The problem is we’re married to the data…. we have to put it in their terms, we have to tie it to the money” Jim Sterne
Kim Johnston used a great metaphor. Every marketing dollar is a bet. You have to decide where you’re placing that bet (greyhound or horse, Obama or McCain?) What are the odds? You don’t have to guess, you have data to guide you – web analytics data, previous campaign data etc etc. Yes, you will want to test new things, but you’ll then have data to decide whether to do it again. With that approach in mind, the mix of metrics you use drives the mix of your marketing, rather than simply looking backwards into history.
Um, the visitor still matters – more than ever
Sometimes at these industry events I want to shout out “what about the human beings actually using your site?!?” In DC I didn’t need to. Jim Sterne informed us:
“We need to be focussing on the buying process – we’re not! We’re focussing on selling!”
In other words, the customer is saying so what? It’s not about us and what we think is best, its about understanding the what the customers wants and needs and servicing those needs better.
Symantec Corporation has reversed their marketing analytics perspective to align not with the sales/marketing process, but with the buying process. They use a “give to get” approach to gather detailed preference and research/buying process information from customers and then apply that information to deliver content and product that meets those customer needs.
I presented a case study about how the user testing and online insight activity for one client allowed us to map in detail the visitors’ research to conversion process and their associated information and emotional needs. It was completely different to how the organisation had assumed. I urged attendees to “challenge and test your assumptions about who uses your site – and why.”
Speakers from Foresee, as well as several of the case study presenters, also raised the point that not only should we be driving optimisation for goal conversion results, we have to improve online customer experience. And users will reward those improvements with … suprise, suprise… increased conversion.
And best graph of the show?
I loved this example that Jim Sterne showed (from graphjam)
Surely the world’s most accurate pie chart?
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Conference learnings, Data, Marketing strategy, Online customer behaviour, Web analytics and web measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.